Read Online When Crickets Cry by Charles Martin - Free Book Online

bluegrass to classical, he knows hundreds of songs, and he can transition seamlessly through all of them.
    LAKE BURTON IS MY BACKYARD. RICH WITH HISTORY, BURTON was once a prospering town, but they flooded it to generate hydroelectric power for the rest of the state. The locals didn't care. They took the money, moved their stills, and watched the water level rise and cover the sidewalks and the stones in the cemeteries.
    In the early 1800s, after the departure of the Cherokee Indians, Burton grew into a thriving gold-rush town situated at the intersection of the Tallulah River and Moccasin Creek. Relatively untouched by the Civil War, the town became one link in the chain of the great railway explosion of the 1880s and 1890s. By the turn of the century, Rabun and Habersham counties held the largest tourist attraction in the country, second only to Niagara Falls. The Tallulah Gorge, called the "Niagara of the South," attracted wealthy tourists as well as Georgia Power.
    The sheer rock walls that fell for hundreds of feet made a perfect place to construct a series of dams to generate hydroelectric power. In 1917, Georgia Railway and Electric Company bought up the town of Burton-which by then boasted three general stores. They built a dam and began flooding the surrounding land on December 22, 1919. The eighty-some-odd homeowners, whose homes had just been flooded, hopped into their canoes and runabouts and watched the lake rise up beneath them. When the lake topped out, the tips of the sixty-foot-tall pines were some thirty to forty feet below the surface of the water, which was as clear as green ice. In a sense, Burton became a flowing cemetery-a lot had been buried up there. Tucked in nooks and crannies all around the lake are more than a dozen cemeteries, some with stones dating back to the 1700s.

    At its highest point, the cliffs at Tallulah Gorge drop twelve hundred feet to the bottom. Twice men have ventured across the chasm. Professor Leon made it across on July 24, 1886, and Karl Wallenda retraced his steps eighty-four years later on July 18, 1970. Once the dams were built, the engineers squeezed the mighty Tallulah down to a trickle. Old men in nightly bathroom runs now pee more liquid than she flows at this point. But all that backed-up water has to go somewhere, so thanks to that trickle, the lake has a surface area of more than twenty-seven hundred acres and sixty-two miles of shoreline. Today Rabun County is home to five hydroelectric lakes, consuming about 2 percent of the county's 377 square miles.
    Burton didn't really get famous until Elliot Wiggington wrote his Foxfire books, and then Jon Voight climbed out of the gorge in the movie Deliverance, and the state of Georgia constructed Highway 400, so romantically depicted in the many chases of the Burt Reynolds classic, Smokey and the Bandit.
    Today Burton is the weekend vacation spot for the millionaires from Atlanta and their kids-every one of whom owns a jet Ski. Rising up out of the oak, pine, hemlock, and mountain laurel, most every inch of shoreline is covered with somebody's dream second home. When it's not being run over by the jet Ski crowd, the lake is home to migrating mallards, buffleheads, mergansers, and loons. Come springtime, cardinals, finch, and mockingbirds sport their mating colors and nest all around the lake. Local year round residents are the hummingbird, osprey, bald eagle, kingfisher, and a few great blue and green herons. And twice a year, the monarch butterfly migrates through.

    In my front yard-which could be my backyard, depending on your point of view-I feed deer, turkeys, squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons, rabbits, and a black bear I've named George, because he's curious. And I am told that, thanks to the Lake Burton Hatchery, the lake is full of rainbow, brown, and brook trout. All told, there are some forty-two species of fish in these waters-including bluegill, red-breasted sunfish, largemouth bass, and yellow perch-although I've